


Good luck

by quigonejinn



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-09
Updated: 2012-04-09
Packaged: 2017-11-03 07:38:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>A week later, Natasha is bleeding in a back alley in Turkey. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good luck

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to D., who as usual, had all the good ideas. Originally posted to [DW](http://quigonejinn.dreamwidth.org/161878.html#cutid1) on 6/16/2010.

12\. 

Coulson is instroduced to Natasha in a briefing room at the NSA: his first time out in the field with a new operative, and he is on loan to another agency. Nick Fury is not there; it's a skinny, brown-haired cryptography geek that is a little afraid of Natasha, who turned in her guns in at the counter and drinks coffee out of a styrofoam cup. He talks to them about the installation they're breaking into, and Natasha listens. Coulson takes notes on graph paper. When the kid is done with the briefing and they're just waiting for the chopper to get there, Natasha goes on drinking her coffee. She adjusts her uniform a little so that her hair isn't stuck in the collar. 

"So you're Phil?"

"I am." 

She turns her head and looks at him, carefully, thoroughly, and says, without really smiling anywhere except for the eyes, "Don't drink the coffee. It's really bad here." 

They work together for eight months, and then Natasha takes a vacation. Phil gets assigned elsewhere. 

 

13\. 

Natasha comes back from vacation, but Phil is on a long-term assignment himself. They don't work together for another two years or so, but then, Phil comes out of the bedroom in the apartment he is renting, and there Natasha is, sitting on his brown couch with her feet up on the coffee table. She is reading his week-old newspaper, and wordlessly, she hands him the manila folder with both of their names on it. He looks at it for a moment.

"Hey, you want some coffee?"

"If you're making it," she says and actually gets up off the couch and follows him to the kitchen. She sits on the table, and the coffee brews, and Natasha wears her black tac-suit with the grip soles and rolling tasers and garotting wire and props her feet up on his spare chair and reads. The sunlight catches on the paralyzer dart casings around her wrists when she turns the page; the page rustles when she turns a page. Phil puts on the small television that he has in the kitchen and goes about making himself breakfast. 

A week later, Natasha is bleeding in a back alley in Turkey. 

The whole way he runs to her, Phil can hear her breathing, rasping and labored, in his earpiece. He hears her whimper when they finish her off; the data is being uploaded back at the hotel anyways, so the mission is accomplished, and without thinking about it, Phil he drops the first aid kit and under cover of tying his shoe, ducks down and pulls his side-arm with the silencer fitted -- when he gets there, the only thing is her body, lying half in and half out of a puddle that has turned red. It looks like she tried to crawl away, and the blood is still coming out of her body because of the slight incline. Parts of Istanbul are on a hill. Natasha's eyes are stuck open. 

He thinks he is going to be sick, but isn't. He goes back to the hotel room and goes home. Home, for him, doesn't mean home home, as if you don't give everything like that up when you go to SHIELD, but it means a specific McDonald's in Pittsburgh. Nick Fury is there to meet him. 

"What the -- "

"Son, your clearance level isn't anywhere near high enough." 

Natasha drinks tea and looks at him over the edge of it. Nick Fury tells them about what he wants them to do next. 

 

14\. 

"I don't know," Natasha says, the first time he asks her. "I don't remember how I got back." 

"I don't know," Natasha says, the second time he asks her. "I don't remember."

"You don't have clearance," she says, finally, the third time, and this time, it sounds like the truth. She will not look him in the eye, even after the mission is over. 

They go back to the NSA for a briefing, and it is no longer the same skinny, brown-haired kid as before. Older. All gray in the hair, in fact, with a little bit of a paunch and glasses. Sixty, maybe? Senior enough so that the version of the briefing sheet he is looking at has actual typing where the sheets that both Natasha and Coulson get have only blacked-out fields. The man has had a career in this service, and halfway through the briefing, he looks at Natasha. He angles his head to the side a little and frowns. His mouth opens, but he doesn't say anything for a moment because he is considering his options. 

"I used to do field work," he says, finally. "A long time ago." 

Natasha breaks off from her thousand-yard stare at the wall to look at him for a moment. Her expression doesn't change, and the briefing continues. 

Six months later, Natasha puts in for vacation again, except she doesn't have anything planned, doesn't have a destination in mind, doesn't have intentions of talking about it. Coulson is frowning at her -- they're both short people, but he still has a couple inches, particularly since business casual for a SHIELD shadow means special-surfaced flats with enough stick on the bottom to almost let her climb a vertical wall. 

"I don't have anything to say to you," she says, tilting her head back with her face blanker than blank. 

Later, that night, when Phil is shucking his clothes off to shower in a Holiday Inn bathroom. The water is on, and it's hot, so the mirror starts to fog up. He has his shirt off, but still the undershirt, and still the belt and pants. As he bends to undo his belt, he catches a flash of movement in the mirror: it's just the reflection of him, bending down to undress himself to take a shower, and he is so tired that it looked and felt like another person in the mirror. Phil breathes out, lets himself think for a moment about another bathroom, when he had been trying to stitch Natasha up with a needle going in and out of her bare skin, and somewhere between the blood on his hands and the blood she was coughing up, she somehow managed to turn on the bathroom fan and say to him, quietly: when you give Super Solider Serum to somebody who already has cancer, it changes the cancer, not the person. 

Phil lets himself think about it for a moment, then makes himself take off the rest of his clothes and have a half-hour shower. 

 

15\. 

These are the annoying things about Natasha: the blank face gets annoying. The only time her breathing rate picks up is when she has the suit on and a body count at her feet. Her sense of humor is non-existant. She knows French, Italian, Russian, Latin, and an easy half-dozen others, but picking up languages is easy when you have been alive for -- for a long time. She didn't pick them up out of intellectual curiosity. To her, they are facts learned in another lifetime, by another person. She just happened to have read the book once, and is she interested in sports? Movies? Current events? When was the last time that she voted? Small talk is something that is for work, and even then, she does not like it. 

Hours can pass by without a word from her. Coulson can make a list of all the annoying things that come with working with Natasha Romanoff.

"How is your nephew?" she says one night, when they're lying on separate twin beds before the dropoff in the morning. 

"All right," Phil says, looking over. He told her about his family at one point during the first time -- the first mission they had together. 

The hotel room is small. The beds are small. The TV is small; her gun is on the dresser. His holster is hanging on the back fo the chair by the desk; he has the backup underneath the bed, by his shoes. 

"Good." She folds her arms over her stomach -- it's a t-shirt and jeans, because it tends to distress the front desk of hotels when you show up in a tac-suit. "Look, you should know something." 

Coulson looks over, good and slow this time. "Yeah?" 

She opens her mouth to say something, but what comes out is, "I'll take first watch." 

Coulson turns his head as Natasha suits up. By agreement, he waits until he hears her zipper clear, and then he can look over. A month and a half later, he not only has an audio feed, but he is watching through night vision goggles when she gets backed into the side of a wharf by people who, a year before, wouldn't have laid a finger on her. She knows better. She has always known better. Did she forget that she told him? She must have. 

He goes back to the hotel and packs up her spare suit, her things. 

 

16\. 

Somewhere along the way, she decides to remember that she told him, and some time later, possibly some Natashas later -- maybe two years, perhaps four, maybe one Natasha, maybe the same Natasha -- they are standing in a parking lot. Helicopters circle, and a fire is being put out. The air smells like wet asphalt. 

"You should go somewhere," Coulson says, finally, and perhaps it is the tiredness and the exhaustion and the wear that is finally showing at the corners of her eyes, but some days later, Natasha straightens herself. 

"Where are we?" she says. It's early summer in the Midwest. It's damp; it's night. There are crickets and frogs, but not yet cicadas. In the yellow light from the street lamp, her face looks soft, and her voice sounds soft, too. 

"Safe house. Called ahead and booked it." Coulson goes around to the back and gets their bags out of the car, slings the long-distance sniper rifle on the shoulder. "Keys to the house are on the driver's seat. You want to get it?" 

She does, and they walk up the driveway together. Coulson handles taking care of the packed overnight bag for each of them and turning on the lights and figuring out what is in the refrigerator and making the appropriate check-in calls while Natasha walks through the house, yelling out various things that she has found. Spare bedroom. Spare bedroom. Library. Exercise room. Master bedroom. The house smells a little musty from being shut up. Phil is finishing up when she comes back down the stairs. 

Natasha is wearing jeans and a t-shirt that she grabbed from one of the closets. They don't particularly fit, but you do with what you have. 

"Feeling OK?" she asks. 

"Sure," Coulson replies. 

They go out and find someplace to eat ice cream and buy clothes for whatever remains of Natsha's lifespan. 

 

17\. 

The way it works is this: there is a computer bank deep in the heart of the Helicarrier that holds Natasha's memories. All of them. And not just the memories, but also, the skills. The languages. The personality. The capacity to choke a man to death with your knees and fingers if there your preferred method of killing is not available. Sometimes, there are write-errors, and sometimes, Natasha pretends that she forgets things, but it generally works very, very well because SHIELD is willing to sink the resources into it. The memory banks require an incredible amount of storage and computing capacity, and it is a miracle of design that may never be replicated and may not have its roots entirely in the human mind, never mind the exact technical details of how the memories and thoughts and knowledge is implanted into each individual Natasha. 

She comes out of the diner, and Coulson, who is standing the shadow, nods back at her. Natasha nods in return, and goes back inside to Fury.

"Sorry, ma'm," he tells the woman in the Lexus SUV who tries to pull into the parking lot. "Training exercise." 

She pulls away, and Coulson looks back over his shoulder. 

Tony Stark is inside the diner. 

At some point, Coulson's clearance level actually started to exceed Natasha's. 

 

17\. 

"What would you do if it was your last birthday?"

"I'd do it whatever I wanted with whoever I wanted to do it with." 

 

16\. 

Natasha wakes early in the morning, and after some consideration, because there is a lap pool and also a basic gym in the house, decides to go for a run. The skies are gray and threaten thunderstorms in the morning, but clear a little after noon. Phil wakes up in time to hear her close the front door, and he wakes up again when she turns the shower on in the bathroom across the hall. On his part, Phil gets dressed, finds that the kitchen is mostly full of beer bottles and empty ice cream containers, so he tells Natasha that he is going out, asks her if she wants anything, and he goes to the grocery store. 

"Do you want anything?" Phil says, when he comes back, and the house is dark because the curtains are drawn against the light. He has grocery bags in his arms. More ice cream, yes, but also, bread and peanut butter and chicken drumsticks for dinner. 

He hears a noncommital noise from the couch, so he puts the bags down on the counter, puts the ice cream and the meat away, and he sits down on the couch, where Natasha is lying on her side in sweatpants and a t-shirt. There are cracks of the afternoon sunlight coming from between the curtains on the door to the outside deck, and Coulson, very tentatively, puts his hand on her shoulder. She slides up enough to put her head on his knee, and after neither of them moving for a while, he puts his hand on her hair. It's soft and frizzing a little from humdity in Ohio in the heart of July. 

They watch TV with the sound off, and the air conditioning on. 

At some point, Coulson surprises himself by drifting off to sleep with his hand lying on Natasha's hair like that. In fact, he snores a little. She thinks about carrying him up to bed, but decides that her bones hurt too much for it, so she tucks herself in a little closer and watches as afternoon TV turns into evening. 

 

17\. 

" -- and watch Supernanny while you drool into the carpet."

Coulson hears a laugh -- quickly smothered -- from somebody in the next room. 

 

16\. 

Coulson wakes, and afternoon has turned to evening. The house actually kind of smells like dinner. He gets off the couch and goes into the kitchen, where it turns out that the drumsticks have been slathered with barbecue sauce and are in the oven. Natasha has made some salad -- lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, nothing cut up ridiculously small, like you'd expect, but torn into pieces and just reasonably sized. It's a regular salad. 

She is barefoot in the kitchen and wearing a t-shirt and gym shorts. It looks like she went for another run. 

"I didn't know you could cook," Coulson says, 

Natasha shrugs. "I can do basic stuff. What do you want to do for dessert?"

Coulson opens the refrigerator and gets himself a beer, and he puts it on the counter, next to the salad, and it's a small kitchen, so when he turns around to get the bottle opener, he finds Natasha there. Their bodies are close enough to touch, and she carefully leans up and press her open mouth against his. It isn't a kiss: he had opened his mouth to say something, and her upper lip is fitted against his upper lip, and her bottom lip is fitted against his bottom lip. Her mouth is breathing against his open mouth. He breathes. She breathes. It's works out best if one of they don't exhale or inhale together, but other than that, it's easy to to synch up. And then, her hand slides up his arm, but she keeps her mouth open and still, like she doesn't even want to kiss. 

At the same time, she doesn't move away. And after a while, she seems to gather up some of her physical courage and does kiss him. He lets her. 

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asks. 

"Am I sure -- what about you?" 

After another moment of hesitation on Coulson's part, they do. Coulson's hand slides under her shirt, and she lets him lift her onto the counter-top. 

A week and a half later, she can't get out of bed, let alone go for a run. They have a talk. Coulson has a shower, gets dressed, and at her request, he calls into a certain secure line and walks out of the house before the caretaker squad arrives. 

At some point, Coulson's clearance and command level actually exceed Natasha's. It costs him to respect the choices that she does get make. 

 

17\. 

 

"What would you do if it was your last birthday?"

"I'd do it whatever I wanted with whoever I wanted to do it with." 

 

17.

 

It works because SHIELD is willing to sink the resources into it. The memory banks require an incredible amount of storage and computing capacity; it is a miracle of design that may never be replicated and may not have its roots entirely in the human mind, never mind the exact technical details of how the memories and thoughts and knowledge is implanted into each individual Natasha. Unless Tony Stark gets involved, it will never be practicable to have more than one of them. The resources are too great. The cost is not worth it for any other operative. 

Coulson stands in the mid-morning shadows, waving cars past the parking lot. 

Tony Stark is, in fact, inside the diner. SHIELD is giving him his future back, and he is very much getting involved.

 

 

I mean, guys, in light of how With whoever I wanted to do it is the first bit where Natasha shows emotion, how fucking creeptastic is it for Nick Fury to put his hand on Natasha at pretty much breast-level when she sits down next to him at the donut diner? Pretty creeptastic. Title is reference to how Coulson and Natasha say the exact same thing to Tony when leaving him to excavate his past.

**Author's Note:**

> I mean, guys, in light of how _With whoever I wanted to do it_ is the first bit where Natasha shows emotion, how fucking creeptastic is it for Nick Fury to put his hand on Natasha at pretty much breast-level when she sits down next to him at the donut diner? Pretty creeptastic. Title is reference to how Coulson and Natasha say the exact same thing to Tony when leaving him to excavate his past.


End file.
